I'm Still Here (2024)
Brazil's military dictatorship, which ran from 1964 to 1985, is one of the twentieth century's more persistently under-examined periods of state repression in mainstream Western cinema. Tens of thousands of citizens were detained, tortured, or forced into exile during those two decades, yet the regime operated with a bureaucratic mundanity that made its violence all the more insidious. It is that particular texture of ordinary life corrupted by authoritarian power that Walter Salles's I'm Still Here sets out to capture. The film is based on the memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, which recounts what happened to his own family after his father, former federal deputy Rubens Paiva, was taken by agents of the military regime in January 1971 and never returned. For Brazilian audiences, this is recent, personal history. For everyone else, it is a window into a chapter that deserves far more attention than it typically receives. If you have any curiosity about Latin American political history on screen, The Motorcycle Diaries and Rio 2096: A Story of Love and Fury offer useful, if very different, companion pieces to this kind of material.
Salles is, of course, no stranger to politically charged Brazilian stories. He made his international name with Central Station (1998) and later brought The Motorcycle Diaries to global audiences, but I'm Still Here marks a long-awaited return to Brazilian subject matter after years working across different countries and projects. Produced through a consortium of companies including VideoFilmes, RT Features, and the French co-production outfit MACT Productions, with support from ARTE France Cinéma, the film carries the kind of international backing that gives it a polished, festival-ready finish without losing its distinctly Brazilian soul. It premiered at Venice, where it won the Best Screenplay award, and went on to become Brazil's submission for the Academy Awards, generating a level of awards conversation that Brazilian cinema rarely receives outside its home territory. At 138 minutes, it is an unhurried film by design, and Salles makes no apologies for that.
The cast is the film's most immediately striking asset. Fernanda Torres plays Eunice Paiva, the woman at the centre of the story, and she carries an enormous amount of the film's emotional weight on her shoulders. Torres is a genuinely major figure in Brazilian cinema, perhaps best known internationally for winning Best Actress at Cannes in 1998 for Foreign Land's Salles-adjacent world, though the fact that she is not a household name outside South America says more about the global distribution of recognition than it does about her abilities. Selton Mello plays her husband Rubens, bringing warmth and substance to a role that is, by necessity, more presence than duration. And in a casting decision that borders on the poetic, Fernanda Montenegro, who was herself nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for Central Station and is Torres's real-life mother, appears in the film's later sequences. It is the sort of choice that functions on multiple levels at once, biographical, historical, and purely cinematic, and it gives the film's final stretch a weight that is difficult to manufacture artificially. Valentina Herszage and Maria Manoella round out a strong ensemble in the roles of the Paiva daughters, grounding the family dynamic in something recognisable and lived-in.
Walter Salles’s 2024 historical political drama I’m Still Here is a film that opens with the poignant premise that when a mother’s courage defies tyranny, hope is reborn.
Set against the oppressive backdrop of the 1971 military dictatorship in Brazil, the narrative follows a woman married to a former politician who is forced to completely start a new life for her family following a violent and sudden abduction of her Husband by the Military. It’s a heavy, deeply significant piece of cinema that immediately grounds you in a very specific, turbulent era of South American history, setting the stage for a profoundly emotional journey.
There is absolutely no denying the sheer technical craft on display here. The cinematography is breathtaking, and the beautiful, evocative soundtrack that accompanies it elevates the mood perfectly. I was particularly struck by the inclusion of authentic Super 8 footage, which gives the picture a wonderfully real, lived-in, almost documentary-style texture. However, I will admit that the movie falls down a little due to its hyper-attention to this gritty reality. I’ve said it before: movies are either an escape from reality or a reflection of it, and sometimes when they lean too far one way or the other, it can ultimately damage the cinematic experience.
Because of this unflinching realism, I’m Still Here is a very slow burn of a film. It features lots of long, drawn-out talking scenes with not much in the way of story development or narrative acceleration. That being said, there is absolutely zero doubt about the incredible acting abilities of the lead, Fernanda Torres, who anchors the picture with a masterful, deeply emotional performance. At its core, it essentially plays out as a bureaucratic drama, and for me, it was highly reminiscent of the classic political thriller Z from 1969, capturing that same tense, institutional paranoia and slow-burning dread.
The narrative structure also takes a bold turn towards the end, skipping forward to 1996 and then again to 2014. While these time jumps have been both praised and criticised by various critics, I actually think they add immensely to the story. In my view, they were absolutely necessary to show the long-term ripple effects of the regime's actions, even if the film as a whole could have arguably benefitted from a slightly shorter overall runtime.
Ultimately, it’s a powerful, beautifully crafted piece of history. I’m Still Here is a deeply moving movie that honours the resilience of the human spirit, even if its deliberate, bureaucratic pacing isn't quite for everyone.
I'm Still Here arrives as one of the more considered and carefully assembled films to come out of Brazil in some years, a production that wears its historical conscience without becoming a lecture. Whether it fully lands will depend on your patience for films that trust stillness over momentum, and for the kind of bureaucratic dread that creeps rather than crashes. It is, in many ways, a companion piece to a broader tradition of films about what ordinary families do when the state turns predatory, sitting comfortably alongside work like Red Island, another recent film concerned with how political violence reverberates through domestic life long after the official record has moved on. Salles has made something measured and serious, anchored by a central performance that demands to be seen. It may not leave everyone satisfied, but it will not leave many people untouched. Some films ask you to sit with discomfort rather than resolve it, and that, in the end, might be precisely the point.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2024 | Watched: 2026-07-06
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for I'm Still Here (2024) on YouTube
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